And this is how a line is formed, of stragglers and misfits and folk who are grieving a loved one, and folk with a spare penny in their pocket and not much else to do. They follow me, a dozen or more by the end of my saunter, back down to Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop, and I am glad to take a seat in a corner and see folk one by one. They queue mildly, without pushing and shoving, and await the answers to the questions of life and death.

There was a mystic that used to knock at the doors in Fisherrow, and some would take her in. Others, like us, would not. For my ma is Presbyterian, all the way from her striped apron to her Sunday sherry. Ma said the mystic was a confidence trickster, and Da said she danced with the Devil. The fishwives who saw her muttered of her claims in hushed, awed tones: ‘She said my old ma was looking down on me’, ‘She said I will find a husband if I go to the Mussel Inn next Tuesday and wear green.’

I find I am somewhere in between. Somewhere in between the Presbyterian and the confidence trickster, which, given my roots, makes sense.

I say that the world next to death, next to God, is a dark void and there is neither fear nor anger there, nor regret of things said or unsaid. It is a great peace. Folk like to hear that. It lights up their faces. I admit that I have not seen their dead kin, but I say that I feel, with all my heart, they are with the Lord now. I suppose that is the trickster in me, for they look at me with a bit of awe and consider me delivered from death, which gives great importance to my words.

I do not talk of the snake, for he is my particular nightmare, and mine alone.

I do not tell them of my deal with Dr McTavish, or that I pissed myself on the gallows in fear under my best dress. Or that the hangman loosened my bindings and I gripped onto the noose, clinging on for dear life, until everything went black.

I do not tell them that I think I searched for my own babe and did not find her there, in the beyond, and that terrifies me.

I don’t need to go out wandering again.

Over the next week or so it even gets into the Courant that Half-Hanged Maggie takes an audience at Aunt Jenever’s Gin Shop on weekday mornings: a penny for a five-minute private sitting. ‘“But do not be tempted to stay and drink the gin, for this craze of taking these cheap medicinal waters is leading to a generation of drunkards”,’ cries Aunt Jenever, reading out the article, before slapping the news-sheet down on the table.